The Ask

by Sam Lipsyte (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $25)

In Lipsyte’s third novel, Milo Burke, a failed artist, works in the development office of a mediocre university in New York to support his resentful wife and preschool-age son. Losing his job after insulting the daughter of a donor, he is offered the chance to win it back if he can solicit a major donation—an “ask”—from a privileged former classmate with an Internet fortune and, as it turns out, a threatening illegitimate son who lost both legs in Iraq. Milo is charged with buying the young man’s silence, and there ensues a cynical, spot-on satire of America after the meltdown. Lipsyte shakes his comic cocktail of sarcasm and bitter impotence to eloquent effect: briefcases on wheels are “luggage for people not going anywhere,” and a Manhattan salad bar consists of “go-goo for the regular folk, these lumpy lumpen lunches.” Milo is repulsive, hilarious, and devastatingly self-aware, but it is his country that is Lipsyte’s real subject. ♦